Sir,

The Lockerbie disaster remains by far the worst terrorist outrage the UK has yet seen. Its ramifications now reach far beyond the limits of UK party politics, let alone those at Holyrood.

We are all in the dock now, and only by honest re-evaluation of how we failed before during and after the disaster, can we retrieve anything of value from the wreckage of how we have dealt with it.

Although our Fatal Accident Inquiry in 1993 was crippled by the concealment from it of the evidence demonstrating a singularly apposite break-in at Heathrow, just as the Zeist trial court was, the FAI did record that Lockerbie was a preventable disaster.

Yet no UK Prime Minister has agreed in 20 years to our call for a full inquiry.

The failure of prevention was the direct reponsibility of the Thatcher government of the day, very possibly through the woefully inadequate security at Heathrow perimeter, rather than baggage transfer arrangements there, neither aspect had made any useful response to the many known and timely warnings received by the UK government.

All UK administrations since have failed to face up to that failure.

The Scottish government can now draw on the full findings of our SCCRC. The real possibility they raised that there might have been a miscarriage of justice must be resolved at once.

Not at the glacial pace imposed upon the early stages of Megrahi's second appeal largely by the Crown Office's delaying tactics, but swiftly.

The entire SCCRC findings plus the material held by the defence solicitors are within our country. They must now be protected from interference and co-opted and used openly and at once.

How that can be done, Scotland must decide.

Observers know how delicate is the balance between an executive and its legal authorities. The need to find that balance so as to allow the setting aside of the verdict if found appropriate, is urgent, for our country, for the relatives, yes and for the sake of the man who is now with his family in Tripoli.

We must find a way to define whether that verdict is justified in view of all the evidence we now have available, and in view of the paths that we took to reach the present impasse.

For a man to be convicted on such evidence and then endure 8 years in jail while he approached to within a hair's breadth of his own death, just because our system could not even make use of the available materials within all that time, already beggars belief .

Scotland, the land of the enlightenment? What has become of us now?

Dr Jim Swire, father of Flora, murdered at Lockerbie 21/12/88.

Addendum: Extract from "The Downing Street Years", by Margaret Thatcher, 1993. Re  - her support of Reagan's bombing of Tripoli/Bengazi in 1986 which seem to deny Libyan responsibility for Lockerbie.
Emphasis supplied by Jim Swire.

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I felt that people were looking at me strangely, as if I had done something terrible, which given the sensational and biased media coverage you could understand. When I explained to party workers at a reception that our action had been taken to protect the victims of future terrorism, they understood: but the accusation of heartlessness stuck - and it hurt. Yet the Libyan raid was also a turning point; and three direct benefits flowed from it.

First, it turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan-sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined. We are all too inclined to forget that tyrants rule by force and fear and are kept in check in the same way. There were revenge killings of British hostages organized by Libya, which I bitterly regretted. But the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not and could not take place. Gaddafi had not been destroyed but he had been humbled. There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years.

For more on this aspect of the Lockerbie affair, see Tam Dalyell's recent revelations, here.